Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

“They got away!”

“I’m sorry” Jessica spoke up. “Um, who did?”

“My babies.”

His eyes swept up to her, squinting through a film of milky white. A look of confusion overtook his panicked expression, and a bright line of drool on his chin sparkled in the sunlight. Tufts of white beard poked out along his wrinkles, as if his razor couldn’t reach into the crevasses of his ancient face.

“It’s okay, Dad, I’ll find them.”

Through the screen door, Jessica saw Rex’s pale bespectacled face come into focus. The rusty springs screeched again as he reached out to take his father’s shoulder firmly.

“You just sit down in here and we’ll look for them.”

Rex pulled his father in through the door, the old man’s words reduced to mutterings at his touch. The screen door swung closed behind them, bouncing to a stop in a series of claps against its frame.

Jessica reached out and squeezed Jonathan’s hand. “Did I say thanks for coming, by the way?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he croaked.

Footsteps returned, and Jonathan dropped her hand.

“Was it you guys who called earlier?” Rex opened the door and stepped out, squinting in the sunlight. He waved them over to a trio of lawn chairs at the far end of the porch. He was dressed in the same uniform he wore every day to school: dark pants and a collared shirt so black that his pale face had seemed to hover in the air behind the screen door. His heavy boots clumped along the porch, the metal chains around the ankles jingling and flickering in the sun. He’d told Jessica the anklets’ names a few days before—tridecalogisms like Conscientious and Dependability.

“Yeah, that was me.” The wooden steps bowed slightly under Jessica’s feet as she climbed up onto the porch. She noticed that Jonathan waited until she was all the way up before following, not wanting to test the old planks with their combined weight. He seemed to be limping. What had happened to him on the way home last night?

“Sorry about my secretary,” Rex said dryly. “He’s a bit distracted lately.”

“Uh, sure. But he told me you were home. So we came over.”

Rex took off his glasses, looking into Jessica’s eyes with an intensity that made her look away. Without the glasses, she knew, the world was a blur to Rex in normal time. But the faces of other midnighters were different: he could see them perfectly, daylight or midnight.

“I thought you were still grounded,” he said.

“Yeah, but I can see friends once a week.”

Rex sat down and then glanced at Jonathan. “I’m honored.”

Jessica eased herself carefully into a lawn chair, half expecting it to collapse. Its aluminum frame was cold even through her wool skirt, and the arms were sandpapery with brown rust.

“Something happened,” Rex said simply. He knew they hadn’t come by for a chat.

Jessica looked up at the window next to their heads. It was open, chill gusts sucking the loose mosquito screen in and out as though it were some living membrane.

“Don’t worry about him,” Rex said, smiling faintly. I keep no secrets from Dad.”

“We saw something last night,” Jonathan said. He gave the word night the subtle emphasis they all used when they meant the secret hour.

Rex nodded sagely. “Animal, vegetable, or darkling?”

“Human,” Jessica said. “Frozen across the street from my house, pointing a camera at my window.”

Rex frowned, boots scraping along the porch as he drew himself up smaller in the lawn chair. Suddenly he looked the way he did at school: nervous and indecisive. His swagger only appeared in the secret hour or when midnighter business was being discussed. The mention of an ordinary human had deflated him.

“Like a stalker?”

“Nothing that normal,” Jonathan said.

Jessica glanced at him sidelong. Stalkers were normal now?

“I watched him after the hour ended,” he continued. “The guy was taking pictures exactly at midnight. He had one of those cameras that…” He held up an invisible camera in his hands and sucked his teeth, making a series of hissing noises. “You know, takes a lot of pictures in a row. I think he was trying to see if anything… changed at midnight.”

“You exposed the film, right?”

“Um…” Jonathan and Jessica looked at each other.

“No?” Rex smiled, put his glasses back on, and tipped back in his chair, as though on familiar ground again. “Well, it’s no big deal. The pictures might reveal a shift at midnight. I mean, you probably moved your curtains during the secret hour.” He shrugged. “People tried something called “spirit photography” back in the early 1900s. Especially here in Bixby. But it doesn’t really show anything.”

“How can you act like this is no big deal?” Jessica cried. “The guy obviously knows about midnight!”

Rex nodded, rocking his chair slowly. “It’s not unprecedented.”

“What do you mean?”

He stood, clumping to the screen door and opening it with a screech.

“Let me show you something.”

Even with all the windows open, the house had a smell. More than one, in fact. There was old-person smell, like the rest home outside Chicago where Jessica’s grandmother was quietly growing senile. And there was also the distinctive scent of spent cigarettes marinating in water-filled ashtrays. “It’s a safety thing,” Rex said when she raised her eyebrows at a bowl of soggy, disintegrating stogies. “Dad isn’t very good at putting his butts out. The water helps.”

Under everything else was the insistent smell of cat piss. A big tom splayed across a well-clawed couch watched them pass, managing to look bored, annoyed, and regal at the same time.

Rex’s father was stationed in a big wing-backed chair, his eyes locked on an empty aquarium with scratched glass sides.

“Where are they?” he asked feebly as Jessica tiptoed past.

“We’ll find them,” Rex called. “They must be around here somewhere.”

“What?” she whispered as they turned into a dark hallway. “His fish?”

Without looking back at her, Rex shook his head. “No, his spiders.”

She glanced at Jonathan, who shrugged.

Rex’s room was at the end of the hall and had a different smell from the rest of the house. The mustiness here was of old books and museum exhibits. Piles of notebooks and unbound paper were arranged precariously in towers, and rows of books covered every wall. One bookshelf blocked the room’s sole window—it certainly seemed as if Rex was more afraid of the light than the dark.

“Home sweet home,” he said.

As Jessica’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, a few titles came into focus. Pretty much what she would have expected, but more. There were histories of Oklahoma, settlers’ diaries and accounts of the displacements and the Trail of Tears, when Native Americans had been crowded into the Oklahoma Territory more than a hundred years before. Stretching farther back, there were books on prehistoric peoples of the New World and on Stone Age tools and animals. She and Jonathan stepped over stacks of paper handwritten documents bearing the Bixby town seal and old pages from the Bixby Register.

As far as Jessica could tell, Rex had photocopied about half the local library and piled the results in his room. Even his bed was covered with papers. On a few were inscribed the spindly figures that recorded midnighter lore. She recognized the torchlike rune for her own talent—flame-bringer. A few lunches ago Rex had tried to teach her the symbols for the other talents: polymath, acrobat, seer, and mindcaster. But she could hardly make anything out on the densely scrawled pages.

A backpack was slung on the only chair in the room. Rex took a seat and cleared his throat.